Musical Classicism and the Newtonian World View

by Dr. Greg Pepetone

Associate Professor of Music and Interdisciplinary Studies

The Classical era in music extends from 1756 to 1830. During this period, the piano replaced the harpsichord as the musical connoisseur’s instrument of choice. Musical genres such as the string quartet, the symphony, and the multi-movement solo sonata emerged as preeminent. Instrumental music, for the first time, equalled and even surpassed vocal music in depth, range, and complexity. Accessibility, freedom from the intricacies of Baroque counterpoint (i.e. multiple melodies sounding simultaneously), grace, elegance, taste, refinement, formality, ornamental detail, optimism, and sensibility: These were the aesthetic qualities valued by musical Classicism. Its most representative composers are Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1797), and Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827).

Taking its cues from ancient Greco-Roman culture, the Classical era promoted moderation, tolerance, emotional restraint, reason, rhetorical eloquence, and consensual wisdom rather than originality of thought or feeling. It frowned upon enthusiasms of any kind, whether religious, political, or aesthetic. Indeed, the temper of the times was skeptical of religious revelation in any form. Its ideal was the Renaissance ideal of the broadly educated, well-rounded individual. The best short description of late eighteenth-century neo-Classical culture, in my view, is to be found in David Cecil’s stylish biography of the notable British parlimentarian, Lord Melbourne. Though Cecil confines himself to a particular nation and social caste, his characterizations of rural Whig aristocracy in England are generally applicable to the ethos of European culture during the Enlightenment. With reference to the Renaissance ideal that inspired many of those who patronized Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, he writes:

In practice, of course, this ideal was not so broad as it sounds. The Whigs could not escape the limitations imposed by the splendour of their circumstances. Like all aristocrats, they tended to be amateurs. When life is so free and so pleasant, a man is not likely to endure the drudgery necessary to make himself really expert in any one thing....Again, their taste was a little philistine. Aristocratic taste nearly always is. Those whose ordinary course of life is splendid and satisfying, find it hard to recognize the deeper value of the exercise of the solitary imagination, art to them is not the fulfillment of the soul, but an ornamental appendage to existence. In books, they appreciated acute, wittily phrased observation of human nature, or noble sentiments expressed in flowing periods; Cicero, Pope, Horace, Burke. The strange and the harsh they dismissed immediately. Among contemporary authors they appreciated Jane Austen, condemned Crabbe, for the most part, as sordid and low; and neglected Blake almost entirely.

It is both interesting and revealing that Cecil avoids any discussion of Whig musical preferences. Perhaps that’s because only one of the three Classical composers mentioned above fits neatly into Cecil’s depiction of the late eighteenth-century. Only Haydn, who lived a long, productive, and satisfying life, seems free of latent Romantic tendencies that sometimes threaten to escape from the Classical frame in Mozart and frequently succeed in doing so where Beethoven is concerned. Nevertheless, there is a deep and distinctly "un-Enlightened" vein of Christian piety and humility in Haydn, as there was in Dr. Johnson, another allegedly representative figure. It finds explicit expression in Haydn’s sacred masses and oratorios, such as The Creation, though it informs his entire outlook. The mystical side of Mozart, meanwhile, which is utterly ignored in Peter Shaffer’s pop-culture film biography, "Amadeus," has inspired theologians and philosophers as diverse as Kirkegaard, Schliermacher, and Barth to speculate on its religious import; while the spiritual implications of Beethoven’s music gave rise to a quasi-religious cult sometimes referred to as the nineteenth-century Art Religion.

What has any of this to do with the science of Sir Issac Newton? The answer is that whether we are discussing the mind set of eighteenth-century Whig society, the literature of Austen, or the art music of Mozart and Beethoven, we are inevitably discussing a world view that was popularized in Western civilization by the scientific discoveries of Newton. His vision of a machine-like universe in which atomic units of inert matter interacted upon one another in ways that were predetermined by elegant yet inexorable laws of mathematics is the root vision behind much of the thought, behavior, and art that came out of Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In music, for example, we find that the defining characteristics of the Classical style such as dynamic equilibrium, linearity, symmetry, restraint, clarity, elegance, precision of detail, and formal clarity are also defining characteristics of the Newtonian paradigm. As we will see momentarily, even the rhetoric of Classical era music, with its staccato articulation, triadic melody/harmony, geometric rhythmic figuration, and periodicity are analogues to the intellectual model of the universe presented by Newton. Let’s begin this Newtonian analysis of musical Classicism by looking more closely at the issue of Classical rhetoric:

Staccato Articulation - This is defined as a sequence of notes that are short and detached, as distinct from legato articulation which is smooth and connected. These Italian terms indicate the manner in which the notes of a melody or scale are to be executed. If you can imagine yourself playing a piano on which the keys are burning hot, chances are that you would instinctively use staccato articulation. The brief space that would separate each note would be dictated by your need to minimize painful contact with the keyboard. Such articulation duplicates in sound Newton’s conception of a universe in which the patterns that we perceive as solid objects are in fact comprised of discrete atomic units. In terms of its emotional effect, staccato articulation tends to be associated with the buoyant optimism of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment was, after all, the period of the French and American Revolutions. These were events inspired by a renewed confidence in the ability of peoples and nations to shape their own destiny. The Enlightenment is also known as the Age of Reason. It has been said that to those who feel, life is a tragedy, while to those who think, it is a comedy. The most common physical expression of comedy is laughter, a vocal gesture that consists of staccato articulation (a sequence of discrete sounds that end and resume abruptly). Both the atomic nature of staccato articulation and its analog to human laughter would have commended this rhetorical component of the Classical era style in music to denizens of the late eighteenth-century.

Listening Examples: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525, opening of Movt. I (these are MIDI files and won't capture the way the piece would sound if it were performed by an orchestra)- Mozart, Sonate No. 8, Op. 13 (Pathetique), opening of Movt. III, Beethoven

Triadic Melody/Harmony - In music, a triad is a chord made of three pitches, each of which is three scale notes away from its nearest neighbor. Even if you do not read music, it is possible to deduce from this description that a triad is a musical event that is numerically symmetrical and geometric, like an isosceles triangle. Nothing about Classical era music is more distinctive than its tendency to provide melodies that are, in reality, triads (or parts of triads) sounded sequentially. Nothing about the Newtonian paradigm is more distinctive than its reliance on the geometric theorems of Euclidean mathematics and its confidence in a well-ordered cosmos comprised of patterns that are numerically symmetrical and geometric:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night,
God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light
- Alexander Pope

Listening Examples: Sonate No. 16 in C, K. 545, Movt. I - Mozart, Sonate No 23, Op. 57 (Appassionata), Movt. I - Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, Op. 67, Movt. I (this is a MIDI file and does not capturwhat teh symphony would sound like with an orchestra)

Geometric Rhythmic Figuration - The most common accompaniment figure in Classical era music is known as Alberti bass (after an obscure 18th-century composer who used it routinely). It consists of a triad whose three pitches alternate with one another according to the following symmetrical pattern: bottom-top-middle-top. As to its Newtonian implications, see the entry immediately above.

Periodicity - This term has to do with the length of melodies, the way in which they are separated from one another in time, and the ways in which they are combined to make larger musical units. Just as the atomic universe of Newton is mirrored in staccato articulation, it is also mirrored by the propensity of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven to create large-scale symphonic structures from small melodic units known as motifs. Sometimes these consist of as few as two notes (slurs). Sometimes they are longer (as in the example of the four notes that begin Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, known as the "fate motif"). In other words, Classical era music consists of short motifs separated by rests, or brief intervals of silence. These motific units are then combined to make melodies. These melodies, in turn (also separated in time), combine to make the musical equivalents of sentences and paragraphs. The Classical style therefore consists of finely wrought, discrete musical ideas that are conjoined, as in an erector set, to form vast and complex musical structures. When the great American composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein refers to Beethoven as "first and foremost a builder," an artist endowed with an incomparable sense of musical architecture, he is praising the Newtonian qualities of Beethoven’s art. Listen to almost any Classical era composition by Mozart or Beethoven back to back with a Romantic nocturne by Chopin and what you will hear is the difference between a piece of musical architechture organized atomically, logically, and periodically along Newtonian lines, and one that isn’t.

Listening Example: Symphony No. 5, Movt. I (this is a MIDI file, and will not sound like an orchestra)- Beethoven, Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9 No. 2, Chopin

Equilibrium - A perfect balance between the parts and the whole - between emotion and intellect, tradition and innovation, form and content - is a Classical ideal. Ancient Greek philosophers advocated what Aristotle termed the "Golden Mean." At its best, this median is neither a flabby compromise with idealism nor the static balance of a perfectly regulated machine, but rather a dynamic equilibrium in which energy, tautness of thought and expression, and structural coherence result from the pull of equal but opposite forces. For many experienced listeners, the music of Mozart and Beethoven (particularly the latter) offers a sonic representation of this Classical ideal. Although there is a clear connection between Newton’s comprehensive vision of a well-ordered universe and the aesthetic ideal of Classical poise and balance, there are those for whom Newton’s mechanistic view represents a static rather than a dynamic equilibrium. In his The Reenchantment of the World, author Morris Berman points out that Newton’s unhappy childhood was characterized by a strong sense of insecurity and separation anxiety brought about by the premature death of his father and the subsequent abandonment by his mother. Speaking of a youthful notebook in which Newton recorded his sense of "dread, self-disparagement, and loneliness," Berman comments:

Had history heard nothing more from Isaac Newton, these notebook entries would amount to nothing more than a psychiatric curiosity. But we are talking about the creator of the modern scientific outlook, the insistence that everything be totally predictable and rationally calculable ....cannot be separated from its pathological basis.... ‘The fact that the world obeyed mathematical law was his security.’

Berman goes on to quote from Frank Manuel’s A Portrait of Isaac Newton, "To force everything in the heavens and on earth into one rigid, tight frame from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to escape free and random was an underlying need of this anxiety-ridden man."

Symmetry and Proportion - We’ve already discussed some of the geometric properties of the triad and Alberti bass figuration, but the two most important and obvious expressions of symmetry and proportion in Classical music are to found in phraseology and form. If you listen to the first eight bars of Beethoven’s popular Fur Elise, for example, you will discover that the music divides symmetrically into two equal halves. The two halves, or phrases, taken together make a complete musical sentence, known as a period. Now, if you listen even more closely, you’ll observe that the first half of this musical period is essentially ascending while the second half is descending. Furthermore, when two musical phrases are arranged in this way, so that the second phrase fulfills or completes the first, they are said to be related as antecedent to consequent. Another familiar instance is supplied by the opening four bars of Mozart’s Sonate No. 16 in C, K. 545, Movt. I. In this example, the two halves of the musical period are separated by silence and punctuated by a temporary moment of harmonic repose known as a cadence. While there is no clearly discernible pattern of ascent and descent, symmetry is supplied by rhythmic repetition: Both halves begin with the same (long-short-short) motif.

Classical Forms - Classical/Newtonian characteristics such as symmetry, proportion, and balance can exist not only at the mico-level of phrase structure and rhythmic figuration, but also at the macro level of structural outline. Composers such as Mozart and Beethoven worked from a set of standardized blueprints that provided the basic floor plan for their elaborate musical designs. These musical templates, I hasten to add, were not on file at the municipal planning office in Vienna. They represent procedures that were partly intuited from the aesthetic implications of the Newtonian model and partly acquired through imitation and observation. Of these blueprints, the most important is Sonata-Allegro Form. Its importance derives from the fact that it was the preferred format whenever composers wished to make a particularly skillful or imposing musical statement. The three Classical genres that set the benchmark for compositional excellence were the solo sonata, the solo concerto, and the symphony. All of these are multi-movement genres and each typically utilizes Sonata-Allegro form for at least one movement.

Sonate-Allegro form can be schematized as follows:

(Optional) Intro., (A1) Exposition, (B) Development, (A2) Recapitulation, (Optional) Coda

As you can see, this is essentially a three-part symmetrical structure, with a optional prelude and postlude. Here’s what happens in each of the principal sections:

Exposition - The composer introduces her two primary themes (or theme groups). Usually these are contrasting. If theme I ( or theme group I) is gentle and lyrical, theme II will be assertive and heroic. As in good expository prose style, the composer transitions from theme I to theme II by introducing a specially designed transitional passage. Think of the exposition as Act I in a three-part dramatic structure or as the opening chapters of a long novel in which the most important characters and situations are presented.

Development - In this section the composer takes his principal motifs or themes and explores their potential, much as a dramatist or a novelist might take her principal characters and place them in different groupings or settings. These changes will provide the means of

developing potential tensions and conflicts both within and between the different characters. Similarly, a musical theme that appears as lyrical in the exposition might reappear as heroic in the development section, or vice versa. A composer might seize on only a fragment of a theme and make it the basis for an entire passage. Moreover, it is often in the development section that composers will modulate to far flung key centers thereby creating the allusion of distance and travel to remote locales (a concept that will be explained more fully in connection with musical Romanticism). The creative options are many and complex, but the aesthetic purpose is simple - to thicken the plot.

Recapitulation (Recap) - In this often concluding section, we return to the beginning of the musical narrative and the principal melodies and harmonies are once again presented in their original sequence. The one crucial difference is that whereas in the exposition the first and second theme groups engage in a harmonic tug-o-war, in the recapitulation this element of harmonic conflict is resolved. Imagine yourself and a friend starting to sing the same tune in unison only one of you starts on the wrong pitch. Something like the sort of musical conflict that would ensue is built into the exposition and removed from the recap. In the mature Classical style of Beethoven, however, the effect of this repetition is much more than a polite nod at Greco-Roman symmetry or Newtonian predictability. It is a recursive cycle that provides the listener with an opportunity to measure a change in perception brought about by the development section.

That section functions like the second act of a play such as J. B. Priestley’s "Time and the Conways," in which Act III replicates the setting and character groupings in Act I, while Act II develops our understanding of characters and situations by revealing their hidden facets. Similarly, in the development section of a work such as the opening movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") we experience the principle themes and motifs reconfigured rhythmically, changed in character, juxtaposed in new and revealing ways, and placed in various harmonic settings. As a result, we are allowed to explore their hidden potential, encounter them in conflict, and come to understand them in ways we could not have anticipated at the outset of the symphonic drama. Consequently, when they return in the recapitulation of Sonate-Allegro form in their original guise and costume, we perceive them differently. In reality, however, it is we and not they who have changed. Beethoven, more than any other Classical era composer, is responsible for transforming the development section from a brief contacting interlude into an extended psycho-musical drama. In the hands of Haydn and Mozart, Sonate-Allegro form was often, like Newton’s mechanical model of the universe, a vehicle for the creation of sound-structures that were objective, abstract, and intellectually rather than emotionally satisfying. In Beethoven, the Newtonian format that he inherited from Haydn and Mozart is transformed into a subjective, often gothic, psychological narrative. It is primarily for this reason, that he is viewed as not only a great Classicist, but as a forerunner of the Romantic movement in music.

It is through his unique combination of Classical/Newtonian form with Romantic/gothic content that Beethoven achieves a kind of ideal synthesis that Haydn seldom, if ever, approaches and that Mozart achieves only within a much more restricted emotional range. This observation raises an important issue with regard to the way in which form relates to content. In a piece of music such as the opening movement of Beethoven’s Appassionate Sonate, the Newtonian paradigm is expressed through its strict adherence to traditional Sonate-Allegro form while motifically, harmonically, and melodically, this work is a

gothic masterpiece. In gothic arts, Newton’s model of the universe as a perfect machine in which every event is theoretically explicable, but only in terms of the chain of events that preceeded it, is subverted by the introduction of mysterious agencies and events that defy the impersonalism, strict causality, and comprehensibility of the Newtonian paradigm. Newton’s conception is expressed admirably by one of English fiction’s best known heroes of scientific rationality, Sherlock Holmes, when he says:

From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link.
-The Sign of the Four

Psychologically speaking, the kind of behavior most appropriate to Newton’s universe is exemplified by the charter of Spock, in the popular sci-fi series, Star Trek. Intuition, imagination, spontaneity, wonder, obsession, fear, love - these are the qualities that the rationalist Spock seeks to suppress in himself. He does so because they are messy, disruptive, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. They may easily lead to violence, passion, mystical experience, or even madness. That is why classical Romantics like Beethoven do not stress control at the expense of abandon, or vice versa. Instead, they seek to combine and transcend these opposites, as the English Romantic poet Blake, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, sought an alternative to a world in which the violence of the tiger and the gentleness of the lamb are irreconcilable. The quest for that ideal was continued later in the nineteenth-century by Charlotte Bronte and Robert Schumann, two artists on whom we will focus presently.

With reference to the Appassionata, Charles Rosen comments, "The opening movement is almost rigidly symmetrical in spite of its violence." In other words, the emotionalism of its content and the rationalism of its form are in dynamic equilibrium. They compliment and strengthen one another.Its obsessive use of the "fate motif" (the same four note rhythm with which Beethoven begins the Fifth Symphony), its inchoate stammering-note rhythmic figuration, its tempestuous arpeggiation, its abrupt changes of volume, and its use of rhetorical silences (a musical metaphor of death), clearly identify this work as gothic in content. But its disciplined formal logic and symmetry also convey a message that is Newtonian. In this rare combination of strict form and free content lies the essence of Beethoven’s greatness and his relevance to a culture that is constantly in danger of sacrificing dynamic equilibrium to either gothic excess (e.g., violence, mindless skepticism - or an equally mindless credulity, and nihilism) or rational excess (e.g., neo-Puritanism, politico-economic zealotry, and inhumane technology).

Nevertheless, the very possibility of an art in which form and content might either fulfill or contradict one another, suggests that a desire for psychic balance and wholeness may have informed the "loose" structures used by Classical era novelists like Goethe, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett as well as the more overt Gothic experiments of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliff. In other words, the gothic imagination was often present in the forms used by late eighteenth-century writers even when the content of their stories had nothing to do with demons and dungeons. Conversely, attempts by later Romantic artists to either subvert the established Classical forms or dispense with them altogether was motivated, not by incompetence, but by a desire to achieve integrity of form and content. Some of the ways in which they went about doing so will form the topic of my next chapter.

copyright © Dr. Deborah Vess 1998-2001, Georgia College & State University and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. All rights reserved. Rights to chapters authored by contributing faculty members reserved to Georgia College & State University, to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at GC&SU, and to the individual faculty authors.